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What’s the perfect thing to do after celebrating Thanksgiving with your family? Get right back to work and plan for the new year. And to get into the domaining mood right in the new year, what’s better than a domain industry conference at a low price? Today’s the last day to get your NamesCon tickets for the event from January 13th to 15th in Las Vegas, NV for $199 + fees. Fees double tomorrow to $399.

Richard Lau, the organizer of the event told DNN: “We are at over 200 attendees already and expect to hit more than 400 at the conference. The opening party on Monday (6:30pm – 9pm) will be hosted by .XYZ at the Tropicana, and the Tuesday night party will be at the Havana Room at the Tropicana from 8pm-midnight.“

With hotel prices as low of $79 a night +$10 resort fee at the Tropicana right on the strip this ‘no meal’ conference is shaping up to be the event for the industry in 2014.

As of December 3rd, 2013, DENIC, the operator of the .DE ccTLD will also introduce a Redemption Grace Period (RGP) that allows the original domain owner to recover their expired domain for up to 30 days after the expiry, the same as for gTLDs.

See the full press release after the jump.

Redemption Grace Period for .DE name space kicking off in early December

New cooling off phase to prevent unintentional domain loss

Effective 3 December 2013, the managing organization and central registry operator of the .DE top level domain, DENIC, will launch a dedicated cooling-off service (called Redemption Grace Period – RGP) which shall apply for all second-level domain names in the .DE name space. This procedure shall protect registrants against an unintentional loss of their domain(s), as a result of accidental deletion.

Under the RGP scheme, .DE domain names shall no longer be irretrievably lost, following deletion, but instead initially enter a subsequent 30-day cooling-off phase, during which they may solely be re- registered on behalf of their former registrant(s).

RGP cooling-off provisions shall allow former registrants to redeem registration of the subject domain names, by having recourse to the related Restore service, through a registrar. Only if no redemption is requested, during the 30-day RGP phase, the relevant domain names shall become available for registration by any interested party again. At the time being, similar regulations are applied by other top level domain registries already.

Registrars redeeming a deleted .DE domain name for the original registrant will have to pay a Restore fee and may pass on the related costings.

Deleted .DE domain names placed in cooling off, from RGP implementation, will be earmarked by a redemption period status in the DENIC lookup services (whois) accessible at www.denic.de.

As a consequence of the above measures, the current DENIC .DE domain guidelines shall be superseded by new, amended ones from the date of RGP launch, i.e. 3 December 2013, which shall then be permanently published at http://www.denic.de/en/domains/general-information/domain- guidelines.html.

A once in a generation opportunity to purchase the premium domain name: Mario.com.

Pop singers, world class chefs, fashion houses, race car drivers and even plumbers share the name Mario, but there is only one Mario.com. In a once in a generation event, this coveted generic domain name has come on the market. DomainAgents is happy to announce that they are the exclusive representative for the sale of this uniquely brandable domain.

“The power of this domain is its flexibility. Mario is a name known worldwide and could be the home of any number of existing or new brands. There are many Marios, but the new owner will have the opportunity to forever tie themselves to the Mario name,” says Phil McKegney, founder of DomainAgents.

DomainAgents is a domain name brokerage and negotiation platform. While focused on providing a neutral platform, they offer brokerage services for super premium domain names, such as Mario.com.

DomainAgents is inviting interested parties to contact them at sales(at)domainagents(dot)com to arrange a time to discuss the domain.

About DomainAgents
DomainAgents takes a unique approach to brokering domains. Buyers prequalify their offers by buying a DomainAgents credit and in return DomainAgents guarantees that the buyer’s offer will be presented to the domain owner. DomainAgents also runs the domain market research tools Whoisology.com and Namebio.com

As reported by TechCrunch, Go Daddy has acquired hosting company Media Temple, also know as (mt). Financial details of the acquisition, which did not include website builder Virb, which is being spun out, were not published. The two companies are going be operated separately.

According to a blog post by the Office 365 team, customers can now purchase their domains from Go Daddy directly through the product’s interface. The domain will then directly be enabled for use with Office 365 by setting up the correct nameservers and DNS records at the time of registration

Anybody got an Office 365 account? We’d be interested in seeing if this implementation includes premium/aftermarket domains. Let us know in the comments below.

In an article that was published by the Huffington Post Canada last week, the founder and CEO of RIWI Corporation talks about the importance of the browser URL bar and Direct Navigation. RIWI is a data analytics company

Citing a number of different sources, the article concludes that Direct Navigation is a continuous traffic that also helps the connection with the brand and create trust.

Two data points from the article that I hadn’t heard of before:

In 2010, Google was cited (notably in research by Amy Langville of the Mathematics Department of Charleston College) saying that 15 per cent of Web users use the URL bar to reach ads/buying decisions as opposed to hyperlinks. Note: this is not a statistic of the per centage of people who use the URL bar vs. search but rather a per centage of those who simply reach their ad destination via the URL bar as opposed to hitting on an ad hyperlink. Actual use of the URL bar thus has to be higher than 15 per cent if that Google figure is right.

Web and tablet access to sites is rising dramatically. Many mobile users prefer direct navigation URL bar search to searching in Google or Bing or other search sites. The reason is this: the URL is bigger and mobile phone displays are rising. Comparing across categories, (study by Marketing Land, 2012), the results are clear:

It appears that the registry operators for new gTLDs have started the courting for registrars with some marketing efforts. DirectI’s Radix registry has launched a photo contest for registrars to find the best pictures representing one of their 29 new gTLD applications. The twist? The photos are to be shot with a Polaroid camera that will be provided to the registrar teams by the registry. The winning registrar will receive $1,000 USD for a day out/party. Registrars have to submit their photos by September 10, 2013.

After a brief hiatus, Jamie Zoch at Dotweekly.com has returned to blogging. Jamie lost all of DotWeekly.com in a hosting move and decided to take some time off .

Jamie always had good content and interesting insights, so I’m glad to see him back at it. Frankly, domain blogging seems to be a sea of copycatting daily domain lists, weekly sales reports, and who bought what. Jamie always had a knack for coming up with new content. It takes a lot of work to crank out that original content.